Clean up day..

We have had a lovely suprise addition to our garden from Sheila and Klaus who know how much I have admired their "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" plant Brunfelsia so called because the flowers change colour during their three day lifespan and from that colour you can tell how old the flower is.  Starting with a deep purple colour they fade to a paler lilac and end up white.

They had ordered one for us as a present for our wedding anniversary and decided to hand it over into our care now which hopefully means that on the day of our 'do' it will have settled into its new home and be full of flower.  It seems to have grown already now that it has been planted!

Freaky dolls head (found on a beach clean) has been put to good use covering the tops of the bamboo sticks currently supporting Brunhilda until she grows a little more.  We are hoping to train her into a column up the post.

The new conservatory floor is lovely but now tiled there is nowhere for the tumbleweed to go and so I decided to give it a good clean but ended up with far too many suds and so it needed drying off otherwise it would have looked worse than before I cleaned.  John came up with a novel way of (a) cleaning and (b) using some microfibre pads we purchased for now defunct steam cleaner!

I had a phone call from Elena lunchtime asking if I could nip round and take some photographs of the Orexi team preparing for an intimate party they were catering for being held this afternoon.

I didn't manage to take too many as I got stuck in helping to make some Lebanese Borek which are little crispy cigars filled with a feta cheese filling (apparently!)

It was all hands to the deck with Amoura finishing making the Kibbeh on the left and Bassam making the Kofta on the right!

They managed to get everything completed and packed into the car in good time and I left them as it was our fifth village clean today - being done in the late afternoon as the temperatures are now rising.  As it happens there was a cooling breeze today so it wasn't such a hot and sticky job as we anticipated.

We were joined by John and Susan Read today, they came to our house as did Rob and Diana and we walked up along the back road to the Mukhtar's office.  We realised that this road was awful and although we hadn't scheduled that stretch in for a clean did it as we walked and ended up with a fair few bags into the bargain.

We were provided with cold drinks by Stelios and a fresh supply of bags before we set off.  Just as we were doing so a car pulled up with a man and two boys in it - we thought they were looking for the wedding party that had just passed by but it transpired that Yiannis (who lives in Limassol) comes every weekend to visit his parents and he thought it would be educational for the boys to join in plus he loves the village - as it happens his mum also joined us!  I was absolutely chuffed to bits that we had eventually managed to get some of the locals to join us.  The kids were fantastic and really got into the swing and seemed to enjoy themselves.  We cleaned all the way down the main road to the Kritou Tera turning and were pleasantly surprised that that particular stretch wasn't too bad.  We are going to have to revisit the main road out of the village which goes to the Museum which we did previously as apparently this is awful again.

Our Cypriot contingent had a meeting to go to so John ferried them back up the hill in the car we had left at the bottom.  They say they will come again next time and that is fantastic news although we are going to have to slightly change the date otherwise poor Diana will be cleaning the village on her birthday.

Our reward for a job well done was to have a Meze in Finnikas which everyone seemed to really enjoy and I do believe Diana Norma and I ended up giving an impromptu display of belly dancing!  Probably best we had finished eating at that point!